This twenty minute podcast features an interview with Andrew Torget, Director of the Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond. It was recorded at the Coalition for Networked Information Fall 2008 Task Force Meeting.
The Digital Scholarship Lab is a center for innovation, bringing together scholars, technologists, and the public in order to explore how emerging technology can change the ways we understand the human past, present, and future. Two of the projects discussed in this interview include “Voting America” and the “History Engine.” Both projects experiment with what the future of teaching and research might be in the digital age. “Voting America” employs visualizations and cinematic techniques to make a massive amount of data--the 1.6 billion votes that have been cast in presidential elections during the last 164 years--more accessible to students of history and politics. The “History Engine” captures the research of undergraduate students and aggregates their work to produce a very detailed, very large resource about the American past, one that is valuable both to students within the classroom and to a larger public. Both projects are designed to model how colleges and universities might seize new opportunities and meet the challenges presented by digitized resources and digital techniques.
This interview is provided courtesy of CNI and was recorded at their 2008 Fall Task Force Meeting. The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) is an organization dedicated to supporting the transformative promise of networked information technology for the advancement of scholarly communication and the enrichment of intellectual productivity. You can learn more about CNI at their web site, http://www.cni.org
